Historically, landline and cellular telephone networks have used circuit-switching to conduct voice calls. With circuit-switching, a route and bandwidth are reserved from source to destination for the duration of a call, even when neither calling party is speaking. Packet-switching, meanwhile, has historically been used for network data transmissions. Packet-switching divides data that is to be transmitted into small units, called “packets,” that are independently transmitted through the network, which enables sharing of available network bandwidth between multiple communication sessions.
The recent Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless communication standard from the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) proposes omitting the circuit-switched domain, so that packet switching is used for voice as well as data transmissions. In such a network, voice communications (called “Voice over LTE” or “VoLTE”) are packetized, and those packets travel through multiple network nodes before being delivered to an endpoint.
Voice and video communications are very delay sensitive, and even slight delays can be perceived by end users and can contribute to a negative user experience. If an excessive number of network nodes are traversed, higher network latency for voice and other media packets may occur, resulting in poor audio and/or video quality being experienced by users.